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I'm not sure there's a single reason for the red lion, I suspect it's simply the fact that it so commonly appears of heraldic arms. So if the local landowner had a red lion on his crest, the local tenant tavern may have taken the name as a result. Similarly popular names include the White Lion and the Rose & Crown.

'The Crown' might be the Red Lion's chief contender for most popular name. I wonder if anyone has ever counted?

My favourite story comes from a pub I used to visit in Buckinghamshire called the Bull & Butcher. It dates from Tudor times, and the rumour is that the name was a not-so-secret code for 'The Bullen Butcher', ie Henry VIII, who chopped off the head of Anne Boleyn (also written as 'Bullen').

The Scottish national arms feature a red lion - and many Red Lion pubs roughly date from the time James of Scotland took over as king of England.

There's a a long tradtion of monarch-flattering signs: the White Hart (Richard II's arms), the Sun in Splendor (the Yorkists), the George (any of the first four) and the Royal Oak (Charles II).Putting up a sign that celebrated the monarch was, till the early 19th century, very widespread - though after a while they just became pub names, and people were opening Royal Oaks long after the Stuarts had been replaced by monarchs more prepared to work in a Protestant democracy.

So the signs got overtaken by battles where we'd bopped some Johnny Foreigner (the Alma, Spion Kop, etc) in the 19th century, then downright silliness (the Slug and Lettuce) in the late 20th, then by "For Sale" in the early 21st.

There's also a long tradition of naming the pub after your sponsor - retiring soldiers would use their pay-off to set up a pub and name it after the person who paid for the regiment - so something like "Northumberland Arms" is quite common

Yes Alan, the reason there are so many 'Marquis of Granby's' is that he apparently bought a pub for all his retiring non-Commissioned Officers after some big battle, and bankrupted himself in the process.

Spent many lost 'Happy Hours' in the grotty Granby Tavern in Reading during my dissolute student years. Pound a pint back then...

For the uninitiated it's a game you play in the car, best played by 2, you look out of the window and for every pub that you pass on your side of the car, you count the number of legs - Red Lion = 4, Coach and Horses = 8

Kings Head = 0, since he didn't actually have legs just a head.

NOT a game you can play in the US.

My favourite pub name is the Black Swan, generally known by everyone locally as 'The Mucky Duck'.

Known to our family as "Pub cricket"
We scored arms as well as legs, so the Queen Victoria would score 4. If you got a crown or similar, you were out.
There would be arguments in the car about pubs called things like "The fox and hounds".

One pub sign game is used by parents of pre-reading children to keep them occupied: look at the sign and guess the name. I was extremely impressed when a little boy of my acquaintance on seeing Lady With Decapitated Head Under Arm immediately guessed right --- "The Silent Woman".

Roughly contemporary with the conversion of the rough path outside into a turnpike in the earlyish 18th century - but close to an excellent fishing river - on one side, its sign features the nearby tollbooth marking the entrance to the cutting edge of 18th century transport technology: the superhighway of its day.

On the other, to attract the anglers after a hard day not doing whatever it is anglers don't do all day, a pike twisting as it leaps.

The pub, of course, is called the Turnpike: its sign isn't just a visual pun, but a piece of multi-consumer segmented marketing as well. Who says pubs rot your brain?

>>I decided there and then to have a drink in EVERY SINGLE ONE. so far I have been in 493 as far North as Fochabers Scotland and down to Penzance, the Isle Of Wight, East to the Norfolk Broads and West to Cardigan<<

Didn't John of Gaunt change his coat of arms when he gave up his claim to Leon (the lion in his arms) in 1388?

John of Gaunt had three different set of coats of arms, using the Leon/Catille quartering only during the 17 year he was married to Constance of Castille. His personal device wan't the lion, but three ostrich feathers - and there's no evidence the lion was ever associated with him personally.

Almost any pub with three ostrich feathers on its sign would be named the Prince of Wales, since that's been the badge for successive Princes of Wales since I don't know when. Most such pubs will have been built during the long period when the title was held by her son Albert Edward (Edward VII).

John of Gaunt and the Black Prince shared a mother (as brothers so often do), and the ostrich feathers do seem to have arrived here through her. The two brothers coloured the feathers on their arms differently - and of course Edward had them first, being the older.

But though no doubt Edward III and his wife Philippa forced baby John to wear brother Edward's castoff jumpsuits and toddler-sized jousting armour once Edward grew out of then, armorial bearings just don't get handed down like that.